I trust you and your associates are satisfied with yourselves when you observe the hell you have caused others. When I first wrote you about the Amalgamated stock I was an honest, prosperous man. I had never committed a crime nor done any great wrong to my fellow-beings. Relying upon what you said publicly and the well-known record of the Rockefellers and their partners, I committed acts which I now know to my everlasting sorrow I should not have committed. I had no intention of doing wrong, but when I saw ruin staring me in the face I used, as I supposed only temporarily, funds intrusted to me to protect my stocks from being slaughtered at declining prices by the sharks of brokers whom I dealt with. The rest is the old story. My wife and children are disgraced and oppressed with poverty, and I am serving a five years' sentence in this institution, buoyed up only with the hope that I may live to face you and your kind, that you may have the pleasure of seeing the wreck you have wrought--in the hope that I may satisfy a desire which night and day gnaws at my very soul, a desire to say to you, face to face: "Look upon a man who, although a branded criminal, is as much better than you and your associates as it is possible for one to be," and to ask you how your wife and your children enjoy the luxuries they have when they know at what price they were secured, for I shall surely, if I live, insist upon your wife and children hearing from my lips what agonies a wife and children, who are as dear to me as yours are to you, have suffered because of your baseness. CHAPTER XIII THE "SYSTEM" VERSUS WESTINGHOUSE In 1894 I had just wound up one of the most strenuous and successful financial campaigns I ever engaged in. This was the Westinghouse deal, of which the papers were full at the time. George Westinghouse, to whom the world owes the air-brake and countless improvements in electrical machinery, having surmounted the difficulties that clog the early steps of the inventor who would be his own master, had taken rank, some years before, among the prominent public figures of the day. The various corporations in America bearing his name had prospered amazingly; his ingenious appliances had displaced home products in the European market; and titles and decorations had been conferred on the inventor, though these last, like the sturdy American he is, Westinghouse had put aside.